Our Church is Out of Time
At some point in the 2020s – what do we call this period, the new Roaring Twenties? – I interviewed for a spot in Re/Generation, a cohort of young Catholic leaders selected each year under the guidance of its parent non-profit, Call To Action.
I wish I could be more specific than “at some point.” Some cliches, though, have earned repetition. The pandemic asked and asked again: What is time?
In the midst of the initial nationwide lockdown back in 2020, social media buzzed with proclamations that we shouldn’t go back to normal. COVID-19 wasn’t just a virus – it was the embodiment and culmination of cumulative, collective struggle against seemingly indefatigable evils entrenched in power since colonization, at least. The pandemic was the opening we needed to take a good, hard look at ourselves and do something, everything, differently. It was the necessary bolster for the chants and demands with which we had entered the pandemic.
Me, Too. Time’s Up. Black Lives Matter. Late-stage Capitalism.
The truth is, most of us have gone back to normal and we’re not entirely to blame. We don’t know anything else besides capitalism. When all you know is one thing, how can you do something, anything, different?
* * *
I was accepted into the Re/Generation cohort in 2021. Our mission? An unabashedly left-leaning project to reincarnate the Catholic Church into an organization for the people, by the people.
All love for Pope Francis aside, the church in its present incarnation is merely an institution – a large and, you could say, ancient institution that has become nearly indistinguishable from late stage capitalism. To use “ancient” here is to mean two different things: The church is ancient in that it is rooted in deep history and is the product of sacred scripture; and also, it is ancient in that it is presided by nonsensical values and decrepit figureheads, neither of which have any bearing on the lives of people today. What hath a Vatican bishop to do with the hungry, homeless, and high panhandler on Turk Street in downtown San Francisco?
As a former urban chaplain for the unhoused, I can honestly say: Nothing.
* * *
Writing this article is a project that I volunteered for when our cohort was solicited for submissions about what it means to be Catholic “in this present moment.” I’m a few days late turning in this piece, which makes me feel anxious. Another cliche that’s also true: Catholic guilt.
While Pope Francis has done good work, the opposition against him is startlingly vocal, organized, and dare I say legitimately harmful to the marginalized and the vulnerable for whom Pope Francis defends. Never in my four decades on this good Earth have I heard Catholics speak so openly of deposing our pope.
That is how I would describe being Catholic in this present moment. But I won’t stop at calling out Catholics thirsting for insurrection against our own pope. There is a shared answer to why this article is overdue and what it means to be Catholic in this present moment.
We are out of time.
* * *
In Pressed for Time, the sociologist Judy Wajcman studies a crucial period of late stage capitalism: The digitization of work. It probably isn’t the easiest thing to study a period of time while it’s actually happening, but as a scholar, Wajcman observes some interesting findings.
Wacjman's eloquent thesis is that not only are we doing the same thing through smart phones, cloud computing, and social media that we used to do with punch cards, landlines, and water coolers, digitization has given us a kind of perverse freedom: The freedom to do more of the same. This a perverse, mutilated freedom – a dark power that has enabled us not to make the world better than we found it, but to take more from the world than we already were.
Capitalism is a monster. Acquisition is how it feeds.
Wacjman prefaces her book with a deceptively light anecdote that speaks volumes about the detriment of living capitalistically. Years earlier, she visited a friend who lived in a small village on the coast of Papua New Guinea. Wacjman recalls that “there seemed to be all the time in the world… no clocks!” One day, when she was helping villagers make coconut milk, she suggested that there was a way to do it faster and to make more. She was rebuffed.
“They were not in a hurry,” she writes. “They were not interested in speeding up the process – it always had and always would take a full day to make.”
* * *
When I say that we are “out of time,” I am, in a way, being theatrical.
When you are advocating for revolution, theater isn’t just an art; it’s a strategy. Getting your point across is not subtle work.
In fact, the evidence that we are out of time is laid bare before us – there is no need for theatrics. We talk, write, and post about “burnout.” Scaling down. Taking a break. Yet we do so not to save ourselves but to implement the lived experience which Wacjman has already called out: Scaling down and taking a break just so we can do more again.
For those who have managed to resist going back to pre-pandemic normal and are authentically reordering and redefining their lives, they face the daunting prospect of running up against an institution that doesn’t acknowledge their desired way of life. They are doomed to marginality. COVID-19 may have wounded capitalism, but it’s a poor hitman. It didn’t get the job done.
That part is up to us.
As my own feet teeter upon the line of capitalism and revolution, one half of me remains indoctrinated in harmful norms and feels guilty about submitting an assignment late. The other half, though, is at once exhausted, resigned, and rebellious: Look, I’m a broken human being. But here’s my assignment.
* * *
Two years before the pandemic, I buried one of my best friends from college.
It was a brutal milestone that I had naively put off expecting – I legitimately thought that our circle of friends would grow old together.
Anthony’s death brought a swift end to my own Peter Pan fantasy of a neverending young adulthood that persisted into our thirties. Although we never went hit the bars and clubs as often as we once did, we still gathered together when we could. We filled the spaces in between gatherings with memories of gatherings from our shared youth. I used my youthful Filipino looks to hook up with guys in their twenties as if I were still in my twenties, too.
At Anthony’s funeral, I watched, in abject astonishment, as the closed casket was lowered into the earth. I thought: Anthony is in there. How can this be?
After that, time – perhaps reality itself – unraveled from whatever order it seemed to have when Anthony was still alive. His absence had not only disrupted time, but it also revealed a falseness from which I suddenly felt untethered. I went from grief over Anthony’s death to rage at the way society wasted life — wasted time.
Anthony is gone and you, time, are not what I thought you were.
You’re different. And so am I.
* * *
Since Anthony’s death, my way of life has revolved less around traditional responsibilities and deadlines and has gravitated more and more into the abstract. I have lived through more new normals than I care to count. It didn’t stop with Anthony’s passing or even with the pandemic. My dad had a stroke in June, and while he survived, his recovery is a long process that has consumed the whole summer and has effectively redefined and reshaped the future. The stroke itself happened to my dad, but we have all been affected.
The biggest consequence? I believe even less in capitalism, patriarchy, deadlines, being professional: These are rules, not laws; they are manmade, not the product — not even a distant cousin — of Creation.
Even though I have blithely discarded myself of time shaped by capitalism, there is not yet a certain structure toward which I can actually arrive. This is the challenge and the fear that has likely driven so many to emerge from the pandemic desperate to reclaim their pre-pandemic lives. The old way hurts, but what else is there?
Luke writes of an encounter Jesus had with a privileged individual, a man who believes that he deserves goodness for following all the rules. Jesus disagrees. Only God is good, Jesus tells the man, so if you really followed all the rules, then you will be comfortable taking one more step: Drop everything you have and follow me.
Jesus’s instruction here is often interpreted as a critique of material goods, and while I appreciate the dig at capitalism, there’s much more between the lines. It’s not just that our entire way of life is not right. Our entire way of life is not even good. The pandemic revealed these deep fissures and truths in our church and our country.
I believe in Re/Generation’s mission to reincarnate the church, but we have to face the reality that we are abandoning everything we knew. It’s up to us to do something new.
